Let Them Eat Cake
by Blacksteel1
Summary: The Widowmaker makes cake.
1. Angel Food Cake

1\. Angel Food Cake

Widowmaker is a woman with needs, contrary to the popular belief that she's as cold as her skin tone.

One of the first things that happens when you aren't being periodically brainwashed is that you figure out that there's other things besides the Mission and the Kill.

Sure, she ate food and slept. But for several years, Talon had her completing mission after mission. No rest. No downtime.

And why would she have downtime? She was a living weapon, not a real girl.

Overwatch loomed, first dismantled and then rebuilt.

Gerard.

Talon unraveled. Not overnight, but soon enough they had other worries aside from keeping the beautiful Widowmaker in the dark. They were confident that their programming would keep Widowmaker in the closet, like a broom.

They were wrong, and Widowmaker found herself on the same side of Overwatch. They saved the world. The PETRAS Act was revoked, and suddenly Overwatch was back. Blanket pardons all around. Government funding.

Widowmaker was formally recruited into the team. The core Overwatch members, Winston, Mercy, Soldier: 76, even Reaper, were all weary of her. She had, after all, murdered several Overwatch agents. And Gerard.

They all called her Widowmaker or Widow. No one called her Amélie, which was wonderful since she didn't know if she could be Amélie anymore.

As time marched on, she grew to re-appreciate simple pleasures.

One day, she decided to make a cake.

The Overwatch Gibraltar headquarters was one of the larger Overwatch facilities. Widowmaker's quarters was a box sized room with a bathroom, facing the gardens, which were maintained by a Bastion-class omnic that somehow managed to join the team. The wardrobe was a decent size.

The galley kitchen has massive double ovens, and more than enough room to spread out her tools.

She turned on the food processor, spinning the sugar until it became super fine. Then she sifted half the sugar with the salt and the cake flour, setting the remaining sugar aside.

While the memories were distant and hazy, she could remember cooking with Gerard. His personal favorite had been macarons, though since they didn't have a convection oven in their apartment, the macarons never dried evenly. He always ate them, regardless of how they turned out.

Amélie, meanwhile, specialized in cakes. She was universally hated at the ballet studio she worked at, because she brought in the most decadent recipes for them to sample.

Sometimes Amélie and Gerard used to dance in the kitchen while the cakes would bake, a sinuous shuffle or a jovial waltz.

They were happy memories. The Widowmaker remembered learning how to bake at the knee of her mother, who thankfully hadn't been alive to see her daughter become a monster.

The further back she thought, the more disjoined and dreamlike the memories became. She usually tried to focus on the present.

She whisked the liquids and egg whites together, switched to a hand mixer, then she folded in flour gently with a spatula.

She lost herself in the pleasant process, before carefully spooning the mixture into a tube pan and baking it off.

Spooning the mixture into an ungreased pan, she set a timer and placed the cake into the oven. She sank into a seat at the bar with a glass of some strong alcohol she found in one of the cabinets.

The burn was pleasant, much like the smell of cake that wafted from the oven.

In the morning, all presence of the Widowmaker had been erased, save for the unfrosted cake sitting elegantly under glass.


	2. Lemon Cake

2\. Lemon Cake

Deprogramming and reprogramming the self takes hard work and patience. The good thing about Overwatch was that the current team did not have a leg to stand on when it comes to social mores.

To the Widowmaker, professional assassin and closet pâtissière, the norms for casual interaction were beyond her at the moment.

The cake was well-received by the team. The Widowmaker did not advertise her status as the person who made the cake, mostly standing back and observing. She noted who took a piece and who did not (bar the Omnics, of course).

It made her preen, knowing that her culinary skill was appreciated. Not that her other skills were not, of course.

The Widowmaker remained an unparalled sniper in the field, a death sentence to anyone who crossed her scope. It was probably the sincerest source of compliments from her teammates.

So far, her other attempts to integrate herself was touch and go. She smirked at a joke Junkrat made to Roadhog the other day. Both men noticed, and now Junkrat seemed determined to make her laugh outright. It was a pleasant change.

A week after her Angel Food escapade, enduring a sleepless night, the Widowmaker slinked out from her quarters back to the kitchen, digging around for the necessary ingredients to make another cake. She was in a bathrobe, damp from an earlier shower. Tired, but unable to rest her mind.

She left the lights in the galley mostly off, save for a light above the sink. She didn't want to disturb the peace around her that much. The refrigerator produced the necessary bounty, including a few lemons, butter, and milk.

With the motions soothing her raw nerves, she swayed across the kitchen in her bathrobe, her long hair unbound and draped over her shoulders. The recipe sprang to mind unbidden, and soon she was making a lemon cake. Tart, yet sweet.

Lemon curd for filling. Lemon frosting.

Dividing the batter between 2 lined 8-inch cake pans, she eased it into the oven and pulled up a book on her tablet, reading curled up in the dark until it was baked. By the time the cakes were unmolded and cooled completely, she'd finished a novel and was working through a second.

Splitting the cakes into 4 layers, she filled each layer with lemon curd, a thick substance that added depth and tartness to the sweet cake. She then trimmed the top of the cake and flipped it over to produce a level surface. It was then she made the frosting and gradually covered the cake in elegant swirled frosting.

It was almost dawn, and she was content. The Widowmaker wiped off her tablet, cleaned up her workstation, and disappeared back to her room, leaving a picturesque cake behind.


	3. Madeleines

3\. Madeleines

Social media was both a curse and a blessing.

Like most people in the modern age, Amelié Lacroix had several social media accounts. These accounts contained a surprising amount of information - photos, GPS locations, status updates, all of these things can help pinpoint specific times and days. From there, it would be easy to piece together an idea of what Amelié Lacroix's life had been like. A person who lived that life should be able gather even more.

The Widowmaker was a ghost. She didn't appear in 's team selfies, she tended to avoid photo ops. In Talon, she had been a whisper on the lips of only those who needed to know of her existence. She existed in a grey space, not living but living all the same.

In many ways, The Widowmaker was still a ghost. Looking at Amelié's social media accounts, filled with photos of things she couldn't exactly remember, people she no longer knew, a person who she wasn't anymore. Apparently.

She stared at a photograph of a radiant young woman in a leotard, smiling at the camera, which was precariously tilted to give a good view of her face and body.

She knew intellectually that was her, but no special memories were unearthed gazing upon it. Today, the Widowmaker had a better body now than when she had been dancing for a living. She could remember Amelié's struggles with eating, working out, stretching, running, already past her "prime" in terms of dancing-the body she had now didn't feel like that. It felt stronger. Effortless. Dangerous.

The Widowmaker was a different model. Not a straight upgrade, but something with special features.

A smooth motion on the tablet moved the Widowmaker away from the social media page, from the coittish looking girl in a leotard to a cooking blog.

She tapped her nails thoughtfully on the desk. The scalloped shaped pans she would like to use were still in their packing box, ordered in a fit of baking pique along with several other recipe-specific equipment. Baking probably wasn't the best way of coping with an existential crisises, but at least it was something to do besides killing people.

Putting her tablet aside, she gathered up two scallop-shaped baking sheets and made the journey to the galley-sized kitchen.

Amelié had her first Madeleine when she was seven years old, give to her by her busy working mother in a rare moment when she baked something that wasn't a thrown together casserole or pot pie. Her mother made the tiny, cookie-like cakes with chocolate-crunchy on the outside, but chewy and warm on the inside.

Amelié served lemon Madeleines at her wedding, the reception room opening out into the beautiful L'Orangerie gardens and its adjoining terraces.

She toasted the butter and put it aside. Mixing the dry ingredients, she rested the batter and stuck it in the fridge to let it cool for an hour. She put it in the back of the refrigerator, tucked behind a six pack of beer. Taking the butter, she mixed it with a touch of flour and dusted the insides of the scallop shapes, before placing them in the freezer.

Making her way back to her room, she tugged the tablet close and logged back into the media platform where she'd been before. She passed over the photo of the girl in the leotard, to pull up a photo of Amelié-her wedding reception. If she closed her eyes, she could smell the flowers, Gerárd's cologne. It made something tighten in her chest, she squeezed the feeling, before forcing herself to let it go.

In a blink of an eye, an hour had passed. She wandered back into the kitchen, her near silent footsteps drifting down the dark hallway back to her instruments.

Filling each scallop shell with a tablespoon of dough, she put the baking sheets into the oven and lingered for the short time they needed to bake. Pulling them out, she tested the consistency of the dough and soon had them cooling on a tea towel.

Debating the merits of dusting them with powdered sugar now versus later, she left a small container of powdered sugar beside an artful display of tiny, scallop shaped cakes and went to bed.


End file.
